(1) Field of the Invention                The present invention relates to electronic methods for teaching students to play a stringed musical instrument.        
(2) Description of Related Art
Many music students find stringed instruments appealing because they appear to be simple to play and yet produce a rich variety of sounds and types of music. The musician excites the array of parallel strings with one hand, often with a simple pluck or strum. The musician's other hand manipulates the vibrating length of each string by holding them down with the other hand in a fixed, seemingly simple pattern.
Yet stringed instruments pose unique challenges, and this is particularly true for popular music genres such as rock, heavy metal, jazz, blues, bluegrass, folk, and country-western music as well for genres of more recent origin. Strings buzz or are muted on frets if mis-fingered there. Fret boards may feel cramped. Skill requires rapid changes and knowledge of numerous complex chord fingerings and arpeggios. Much popular music for stringed instruments requires a player to engage in string bending, string “hammering”, or precisely controlled rates of amplitude attenuation. Unlike key boards, the visual layout of a fret board for a stringed instrument does not highlight or clarify the complex relationships between notes in music theory. And an instrument such as the violin (fiddle) lacks frets altogether, making it still more difficult to obtain the exact harmonics desired from a string. Even plucking, strumming and use of a capo or slide are more difficult than they appear to be. Indeed, new players commonly must invest several weeks or months of diligent practice before they have a consistently crisp-sounding performance for even a simple piece.
Tutoring by an expert player helps to overcome these difficulties, and of course it is common for students of many types of instruments to take one-on-one or semi-private music lessons from a music teacher in regular sessions of up to one hour in length per lesson, in an ongoing working relationship that often continues for several years. However studying under an instructor can be an arduous and sometimes expensive process, and the student is often still required to invest 1 to 2 hours per day of practice on his or her own time in order to improve. Moreover it is well known among musical educators that guitar students (in particular) as well as students of mandolin and banjo and other popular stringed instruments tend to include an unusually large proportion of very serious music students who skip most or all formalistic musical training, and attempt to learn to “play by ear,” i.e., these students are often self-taught and may not even read music. Thus these students receive little if any formal coaching or feedback in their attempts to achieve desired sounds from their chosen instruments.
Some of the resistance to formal training arises from the tedium. A common type of drill for music students is the repetitive playing of patterns such as scales, arpeggios, chords or rhythms. Scales and chords are taught, for instance, as the building blocks of melody in Western culture. Arpeggios are taught to develop dexterity in the tone-selecting hand (usually the left hand) and to improve a student's timing. In addition, some musical exercises are designed to improve manual flexibility, to make it physically easier to play the instrument. And so forth. Many volumes of etudes have been written for these various types of drills. However in the present video-dominated era students are increasingly less interested in learning from a text book or from instrumental homework books. Thus music students are seeking a more interactive learning experience even in their self-directed studies.
Consequently there is an ongoing and growing need for devices and methods that can provide interactive guidance and feedback to students who play stringed musical instruments.